8 chorus renaissance lute

Sometimes I sing this song – of course, in Hungarian to Hungarian audiences – of Bálint Balassi (1554-1594) which has a double – Hungarian and Latin – title : Borivóknak való (For Wine Drinkers) / In laudem verni temporis (In praise of spring-time) dropping stanzas 4, 5 and 6. I do this partly because these are the stanzas having the most of the archaic phrases hard to understand at first for present-day’s ears, but also – maybe subconsciously – because I don’t feel like willing to praise ’ blood-stained weapons’.

Still, I have mixed feelings when I drop these stanzas. And also when I don’t. So I don’t quite agree with myself in either case. This needs to be explained:

The ’good, brave frontier soldiers’ gave their lives for the ’sacred case’ defending Christianity and the homeland. The Turkish soldiers gave their lives to save the souls of their infidel Hungarian brothers for the ’only one faith’. There have been so many causes, faiths, and so much blood has been shed for thousands of years for the lust of power operating with ideologies. An is still being shed today.

In my opinion, this poem is about praising life, and that’s why I sing it. And if I don’t hide the fact that it was chiefly the sword that represented manly virtue for our predecessors in their times and that they were led by their belief in defending the country, it is to give due honour to them and is not some kind of sabre-rattling.

If there are flush meadows of Elysium somewhere, and our ancestors – including Sir Balassi – are galopping around on their ’speedy stallions’ there, I imagine they wish us to stop wars and show manly virtues in defending life instead.

In the ’Balassi-codex’ we find this comment before the poem: ”To the tune of the song ’Fejemet nincsen már’<’No place to lay my head’>”. This confirms the statement I made earlier that in this age poems and songs meant very much the same. This translation is the work of the recently deceased (2012) linguist, poet, literary translator of Hindu-English origin René Bonnerjea who lived in Hungary for forty years and besides holding other posts, was a professor of the prestigious Eötvös College in Budapest. Thanks to Andy Brunning for answering questions about prosody in applying the translation to the original tune.